Guy Walks Into a Squat Rack …

The biggest news last week, judging by the reaction on Internet strength-training forums, is Mike Boyle’s attack on conventional squats, particularly the part where he looks right into the camera and says, “Don’t do conventional squats anymore.”

Doesn’t get any less ambiguous than that.

Boyle’s rationale is that the weak link in squatting is the lower back, which he says is a poor transducer of power. The muscles of the legs are worked better in a split stance, where the back is less of a limiting factor. His preferred lower-body exercise is the rear-foot-elevated split squat, or RFESS. Most of us know it as the Bulgarian split squat.

I got the email from Mike the same day as everyone else. The difference is that I wasn’t really surprised by his position. When I was at TMUSCLE, I edited Mike’s article on split squats, which made the same argument, more or less. It went up on August 3.

But even then, I wasn’t completely surprised by Mike’s position. Back in 2004, I helped create and edit a short-lived spinoff of Men’s Health magazine called Muscle. In the second issue, I asked strength-training historian Terry Todd to apply a B.S. detector to all those exercises with commie cred — Romanian deadlift, Russian twist, etc. 

Although it didn’t end up in the article, Todd told me that Eastern European Olympic weightlifters had abandoned heavy squats in favor of an exercise called the Bulgarian step-up. It’s a step-up with a barbell on your shoulders, using a higher step than most of us would use for the conventional version of the exercise.

Olympic lifters, of course, have unique goals and demands; they’re lifting to become better lifters, not better hockey or football players. Still, it seems counterintuitive for guys who compete in the snatch and clean and jerk — bilateral exercises, mostly — to train one leg at a time. And yet, Todd told me, these elite weightlifters found Bulgarian step-ups were not only superior as a supplemental exercise to increase leg strength, they also produced better muscle hypertrophy than conventional squats.

So does this mean it’s time to drop conventional back and front squats altogether? No. I agree with Jason Ferruggia, who says that max-weight back squats are safer than max-weight split squats or step-ups.

But let’s step back from the needs of elite and advanced lifters. In an average gym, those guys are a tiny percentage of the population. What do we recommend for beginners and intermediates, guys who’re unlikely to load up the bar for max singles, doubles, or triples in any exercise?

Even Mike Boyle says conventional squats are important for beginners to master. I’d go farther and say that everybody in the gym who’s training seriously should be able to do a back squat with good form. It’s a fundamental strength-building exercise, and if you can’t squat properly, the chances are really, really good that you can’t do other lower-body exercises. 

The more serious intermediates — the ones who’re trying to improve their size and strength, vs. the ones who’re more interested in holding onto what they’ve already built — should probably know how to do front squats. They’re certainly more challenging technically (especially if you’re like me, and inevitably end up with the bar nuzzling your trachea), and probably more back-friendly, since they force you to lift with an upright posture. 

But I also think everyone who takes training seriously should know how to do lunges, split squats, and step-ups. They’re every bit as fundamental to human movement as squats and deadlifts. Rear-foot-elevated split squats are among the most difficult exercises I’ve done in my own workouts. My goal in my next workout is 10 reps with each leg using 95 pounds. Back squats with 225 or more were a lot more fun.

That’s why, when the name-calling ends, I think Boyle’s anti-squat position will end up in the mainstream of training philosophy and practice. Few people in gyms today need or want to load up for max efforts on back or front squats. I think most people will benefit from focusing more on split-stance lower-body exercises and less on bilateral exercises like back squats. 

Just so long as nobody messes with deadlifts, we should all be fine with this new approach.

Tags: Tags: deadlifts, mike boyle, split squats, squats, strength, training